Farm News 03-25-07

Sunday morning, after chores, 66°

Computer Fun

Somehow the bulk mail program I use for Farm News was trashed, along with the data files. I managed to recover about 75% of the email addresses. So, if you don't receive this, blame it on the computer.

Spring

There will probably be baby bunnies in the rabbitry today or tomorrow. This morning Suzette was in her nest box, pulling out fur to make a nice soft nursery.

Shotgun cat is enormous. I have never seen a cat that pregnant before. She is acting a little strange this morning and the tomcats are acting puzzled in her company, so I expect kittens very soon.

The geese are laying eggs and being completely obnoxious. The ganders are so protective that it is difficult to walk around doing chores. The rest of the year they are generally reasonable, but not while there are eggs in the nests. Beth and Bebe each have five or six eggs in their nests.

I purchased 25 newly-hatched Red Sex Link chicks Tuesday and they are in the brooder, eating, drinking, and growing.

Paula cut a cluster of hyacinths and brought them in the house. The entire house is filled with fragrance.

It's spring.

Spring Chores, an excerpt from Suburbia, by Dr. M.

March is upon us in New Jersey and here that means the odd errant snow storm followed by 50 degree days that make one itch to clean, plant and renew. Thus, my husband and I embarked on our spring projects; to seriously start composting (happily started last fall with the leaves), to paint our bedroom, and to update the lighting in the house. Further projects will follow once these are completed.

Last weekend it was lovely and warm for this time of year so we started cleaning up the yard and organizing our composting efforts. Because our German Shepherd dog spends her days in our back yard, any substantial work outside must start with removing the copious amount of poop therein. Medchen weighs 90 pounds and has a lot of fiber in her diet; so really, the poop is something to contend with. We wish we could do something useful with it, but, hygiene dictates that the offending material be deposited in the trash. That chore over, we attacked the day’s garden task.

First was to address the dog house on the property. Medchen doesn’t use it because it’s in a side yard; also it sat upon the parcel upon which I wished to grow vegetables. We put it on Craig’s List for zero dollars if someone would come and take it away. A bargain at twice the price we figured. We did not figure on how heavy the thing was. The previous owner of our house was very handy, and built things to last, for which Andrew and I are profoundly grateful. We neglected to consider that he built the dog house patterned after one of the cheap ones at Home Depot, but, considerably more sturdy; with a lot more wood, and many more nails, and real shingles. It weighed a ton, and Andrew and I could not lift it. We modified our posting and we still had a willing customer. Andrew tells me that removing the dog house involved backing a trailer into the back yard. I don’t know, I was at work but it sure sounded tough. And with the dog house gone, we could commence preparing the bed for the garden. Of course, the next day we got 3 inches of snow, sleet and ice. Thus, we directed our energies indoors.

Our bedroom had not been painted since the Bush père administration, and the lines and the cracks on the walls matched its age. So, we moved things out, emptied the closet, taped to within an inch of our life, and moved in the ladders. When the emptying was over, all that was left was the king size bed and my dresser. With plenty of swearing we moved the mattress out of the room and put a drop cloth over the rest. We are moving up in the world because this time we invested in the nice canvas drop cloths that actually stay where they are put; a miracle to be sure. Then came washing the walls, which I think just spread the dirt around. With our preparations done we started painting.

Andrew started on the ceiling, and I started on the closet. You learn a lot about house construction painting, like where someone did not quite grasp the concept that the walls are supposed to meet the floor, and that orthogonal means at true right angles, not just a close approximation. We marveled at some of the construction, and laughed at other portions. We sang to the radio and painted. We both got paint in our hair and I think Andrew still has paint on his glasses. We argued some during the process, but mostly had a good time. And the results are fabulous. We’ve gone from a room that looks like a wrinkled old man, to one with smooth skin and bright energy; a lovely transformation.

As I write this looking at our lovely walls, Andrew is reading about wiring for our next project. We are going to install our own ceiling fans and track lighting. Another adventure in home-ownership waits!

Off to the Races

The race is between intellectual property software and open source software. Recently, I have realized that open source software fits the requirements for a Darwin Machine, an idea from William Calvin. Here, in his own words, are the six essential requirements for a Darwin Machine:

1. There must be a pattern involved.

2. The pattern must be copied somehow (indeed, that which is copied may serve to define the pattern). [Together, 1 and 2 are the minimum replicable unit -- so, in a sense, we could reduce six essentials to five. But I'm splitting rather than lumping here because so many "sparse Darwinian" processes exhibit a pattern without replication.]

3. Variant patterns must sometimes be produced by chance -- though it need not be purely random, as another process could well bias the directionality of the small sidesteps that result. Superpositions and recombinations will also suffice.

4. The pattern and its variant must compete with one another for occupation of a limited work space. For example, bluegrass and crab grass compete for back yards. Limited means the workspace forces choices, unlike a wide-open niche with enough resources for all to survive. Observe that we're now talking about populations of a pattern, not one at a time.

5. The competition is biased by a multifaceted environment: for example, how often the grass is watered, cut, fertilized, and frozen, giving one pattern more of the lawn than another. That's Darwin's natural selection.

6. New variants always preferentially occur around the more successful of the current patterns. In biology, there is a skewed survival to reproductive maturity (environmental selection is mostly juvenile mortality) or a skewed distribution of those adults who successfully mate (sexual selection). This is what Darwin later called an inheritance principle. Variations are not just random jumps from some standard starting position; rather, they are usually little sidesteps from a pretty-good solution (most variants are worse than a parent, but a few may be even better, and become the preferred source of further variants).

In the case of open source software the patterns are the individual line of code, which I will suggest resemble, from this viewpoint, genes in biology. As in biology, lines of code are copied, usually in the form of large, interacting collections of patterns, similar to the populations of genes which make up organisms.

Intellectual property software is now built upon the Microsoft foundations: enormous blocks of code and machines for creating code, all of which are considered to be intellectual property. Windows, the base upon which all this is built, is probably the most complex machine ever devised by humans.

Open source software is built upon Linux: enormous blocks of code and machines for creating code, all of which are considered to be public property. My thesis is that the open source software 'commons' is, in itself, a Darwin machine. There are no individual programmers in the open source community who are essential to the continued existence of that community. Open source software attracts programmers who, because they feel pleasure from doing so, will create new parts and pieces in the universe of open source software.

The multifaceted environment of open source code is the internet and all the computers attached to it.

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